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Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

julysun - excellant article. There is a lot to absorb there but certainly good info. as you will note below, I may be looking at acquiring one of Glenn's queens next year.

To the rest of you following this discussion - someone suggested I needed to do a mite count on the drone larvae. Well, I've just returned from the beeyard. I uncapped drone brood and had a look. Bingo, lots of mites, tons of mites. So now I'm challenged to stick to my guns. I swore I would not treat the two nucs of survivor bees I purchased. Its going to be a hard thing to standby and watch, but I am committed to that. It's interesting to note the other survivor nuc I bot has very few mites. I hope it survives. I would like to learn how to do a split or even raise some queens from it if it makes its to next spring. Ourside of the mite count, both hives look healthy. Good brood patterns, nice cresent shape of honey around them and lots of pollen stored. Considering I only acquired them in June, there is actually a lot of honey stored in the second super of each hive so both appear healthy - BUT the one hive has a ton of mites. Could be a sad thing to watch but I'm not going to treat. It's just not the way to go. I'm beginning to think I might requeen my other two hives from non-survivor stock, with queens from Glenns Apiaries noted in the article by julysun.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

Stick to your guns dont treat you will have losses but next spring catch swarms and do splits. If you are going to requeen use local queens not something shipped from far away locations that you now nothing about.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

Been busy so I'm just "weighing in". There seems to be a bit of certainty/assumption, the survivor bees are that, because they clean themselves. Maybe I just stuck on that. There are IMHO, so many ways the bees could be "pressured" into dealing with mites left to their own devices. Bite them, knock them off, 5th instar larvae scent changed so mite can not recognize them. (thought you'd like that one pupation time change, larvae spins cocoon with mite outside. On and on. The ones that apparently are dealing with the mites, continuously, and successfully, not by swarming, must be dealing with them on more than one level with more than one trait involved . MO . Reason, as I understand things, most traits, like grooming, seem to get lost after three generations or so. So, where is, or what are the back up, trait/traits? True, "survivor" bees, IMHO, have run the gauntlet, more than once. If you got that, then,,,,,,,,,,,,I think you might have something. I'm still looking and hoping 2 cents

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

I always like to point out that feral bees have broadly varying expressions of the VSH trait. No single trait is what does it. Selecting for a single trait unnecessarily shallows the pool. Leave the bees to figure it out.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

I will stick to my guns and let the bees work it out. Hopefully they have the traits needed to deal with things. And to wadehump, I don't have much choice but to use queens from outside the area, there simply are none within 250 to 300 miles. I'm hoping by next yeat to take my limited experience and work up to doing a split.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

wadehump - Thank you for the info. Old Sol is where the survivor stock I have is from. We will see how they do.
I have purchased bees from Ruhl Bee a few years ago but did not know they sold survivor bees. Appreciate the heads up.
Sweet Bee Honey is a new one to me, but I know that country well and it is certainly more similiar to the environment here than the other places. Again, we will see how the Old Sol bees do, but its good to know there are other resources nearby. Thank you.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

VSH means varroa sensitive hygiene. It's unfortunately mixed and conflated with SMR (suppressed mite reproduction). It's the ability of bees to chew out defective brood (depending on the testing method, not necessarily cells containing actual varroa as none of the test that I know of use actual mites.) The idea is to keep mite levels below what is generally considered necessary for treatment.

'Survivors', bees able to survive without treatments, have been shown to have broadly varying levels of VSH trait expression.

Therefore, survivors and VSH are not necessarily the same thing. If somebody wants, I'd be happy to allow them to come test my bees for VSH to determine the exact correlation.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

To Keth Comollo my apologies. Beeing fairly new to the beek game I simply lump it all together under the term of "survivor" bees. Sorry for any confusion. I'm still learning "One mistake at a time." Which by the way, I am also in a zone 5.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

Originally Posted by Solomon Parker

VSH means varroa sensitive hygiene. It's unfortunately mixed and conflated with SMR (suppressed mite reproduction). It's the ability of bees to chew out defective brood (depending on the testing method, not necessarily cells containing actual varroa as none of the test that I know of use actual mites.)

Took a day long course on 'selecting queens' this spring, learned a lot about these traits, and, the process of selecting. From what I learned, VSH is a combination of traits. First is the Hygenic part, for which we did hands on testing, using the nitrogen technique. 20 hives lined up, half of them the instructor had done the freeze on the day before. We did the freezing part on 10 of the hives, then we inspected the other 10, to see how well they did on the hygenic test from the freezing a day earlier. The test is to measure how well they removed the dead brood, ie the hygenic trait. The 'Varroa Sensative' part, is a whole different piece. Apparently some bees will sense the presence of varroa in a brood cell, and they will chew open the cap, effectively making that brood cell defective. After the Varroa Sensative part has been accomplished, along comes the Hygenic bees, and they haul that one out to clean up. The goal in breeding for VSH is to end up with a hive, that displays both traits. Nobody ever mentioned a way to test of the VS part of the VSH, the tests were were looking at focussed on the Hygenic trait.

The subject of 'survivors' was lightly touched on, and, really there is only one way to test for it. Take a hive, stick it somewhere, come back in a year, look inside. If the colony is healthy and working, they are survivors. If not, well, maybe they got 'voted off'.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

No disrespect, but mo, it is more complicated than leaving them alone for a year. Too many things could happen in an unmonitored situation. The original bees could have died and a swarm of un known origin moved in. I have hives that are in their fourth season w/o treatment. I still would not advertise and sell queens/nucs under the VSH, survivor, or other suggestion like that at this point. Too many variables. I try to monitor for swarms, but I'm not 100 %. That changes things. Just me and my ways. I do advertise treatment free, cause they are. they are healthy, cause they are, low/single mite counts in fall, cause they are, but I do not have a complete explanation as to why at this point. I sold several nucs to a young lady. After explaining all that, she said, "oh, mite resistant." I told her I don't know that. I do not know what the bees are doing, they just are for now. I'll ride the wave for however long it lasts

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

That's a good distinction to make, as 'leaving them alone for a year' seems to be the perspective of one critical of the idea.

My bees are handled in the same way that bees generally are by everyone except that I don't bother with treating or testing for mites or other maladies. I still inspect, split, raise queens, combine, adjust entrance size in winter, manipulate for foundation drawing, super, etc. The hives that survive (lately in the majority), that are gentle and produce honey are used for breeding. Mean or unproductive hives are requeened just like everyone else, except that I use my own stock.

It's a great way to keep bees, I just don't bother with diseases. Of course if a hive came down with AFB, I would deal with it appropriately, but destruction is not treatment.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

I've read about the sugar treatment and mite counts and decided it would be interesting to try it once (so may experiment) but it is not something I would want to do often! (I already know I would be too lazy). But I've also read and taken a class from someone who doesn't treat but describes how natural hives go into a period of days of no egg laying during the summer dearth and that this is one form of mite control. Bee keepers may see lots of dead mites on their bottom board and think they are infested; yet this indicates the bees are taking care of the problem. The 10 days or so of interrupted egg laying leaves the mites with no where to lay. I hope I'm explaining this right.... I never see this come up in the forums and wonder what beekeepers here think about it?

Rick do you take these things into consideration when you are timing your fall mite counts? Or do you think it is hogwash?

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

Something for you to consider, I won't draw any conclusions, but many of my hives do shrink the broodnest way down in the middle of the summer. Many supersedures take place during this time as well, likely creating brood breaks.

Not all though, I have been doing a round of mid-summer inspections and have found probably a quarter of hives still with large patches, even multiple full frames of capped brood.

Re: Survivor bees vs regular stock and mite counts

I count mites and have 45 or so hives of what were feral bees that I've caught as swarms or removed from structures or trees.

My observations are that our local feral population here is thriving mostly because of long brood breaks. They swarm in the spring and/or they shut down brood rearing hard in mid to late summer during our summer dearth. Like Sols I've observed a lot of queen supersedure during this time.

New Spring queens are an exception and don't take a summer brood break, but keep producing right through our dearth.

Fall mite counts last year showed a drastic drop in mite counts for those hives that did take a long late summer brood break. Hives that kept rearing brood through the summer the fall mite counts didn't fall.